Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Optimism is “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” 1 On the other hand, pessimism is “an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome.” We can see that optimism and…
If we wish to understand the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we must begin with seeing them as a part of the creational order. Trees, along with plants and seed-bearing things, come to life by the word of God as part of…
“I chant slips and irreversible disasters, wiltings, failures, scars, the little disappointments and the large, blue streaks down a world that wishes it was only suncolors.” Paul J. Pastor from Kintsugi Song I recently lost something very valuable. Something I’d had for years and used every day. But, it wasn’t…
In his eponymous book, Jonah follows an exodus pattern. He travels through the waves and east of the city into the wilderness. On a first reading, it looks like another use of this common literary shape in the Old Testament: salvation through the waters of death and the wilderness of…
“Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” The unknowing master of ceremonies didn’t know how right he was. We see this play out in John’s apocalypse. The end is like the beginning,…
Read in isolation, The Test of Adultery (Num 5:11-31) presents the reader with a seemingly bizarre ritual, conjuring up ideas bordering on the Salem Witch Trials. Beyond this, pressing questions linger—such as, “Why is the woman in particular singled out, while no test is provided for the husband of a…
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Fundamental to any cultural scheme is the organization of the two basic coordinates of human life, space and time. A social and cultural world is at least a particular imaginative and physical ordering of these coordinates. Israel?s life as a people was patterned spatially by the sanctuary that was placed…
There is something of a Longfellow revival going on recently, with the publication of the Library of America edition of his collected poems a few years ago, the first time a complete collection has been published in some time. Longfellow was eclipsed during the heyday of modernism, but in the…
Thomas S. Schreiner has some intriguing comments about Paul’s descriptions of his suffering for the gospel in Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ . For example, he cites 2 Corinthians 2:14, where Paul gives thanks to God as the one who “always leads us to death in Christ and…
Thomas S. Schreiner has some intriguing comments about Paul’s descriptions of his suffering for the gospel in Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ . For example, he cites 2 Corinthians 2:14, where Paul gives thanks to God as the one who “always leads us to death in Christ and…
In one of the great essays on Great Expectations , J. Hillis Miller claims that Pip exemplifies a consistent view expressed in Dickens?s hero, which is equally a philosophical view of identity that tends toward existentialism and a closely related view of modern social order” ?Dickens heroes and heroines have…
Richard Gaffin?s work always makes for challenging and edifying reading, and his inaugural lecture as Charles Krahe Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Westminster Seminary, published in the Fall 2003 issue of the Westminster Theological Journal is no exception. Three points were especially revealing: 1) In discussing the relationship…
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